Wednesday, June 24, 2015

The Super Cops (MGM, St. Regis Films, Tom Ward Enterprises, 1974)

The film was The Super Cops, a 1974 production from MGM based on the real-life stories of two New
York police officers, David Greenberg (Ron Leibman) and Robert Hantz (David
Selby, whose credit appears against the backdrop of the naked back of a Black
man and led me to wonder if he were Black — he’s white and that naked Black
back belonged to someone whom the “super cops” busted for drugs early on in the
film), who chafed at assignment to the traffic detail during their stint in the
Police Academy, started hanging out at locations like Coney Island and busting
drug dealers while they were officially off duty, and ultimately for their
screw-ups were sent to the largely Black Bedford-Stuyvesant district, where
they went off on a holy war against the Hayes brothers (Charles Turner and
Ralph Wilcox) who controlled drug distribution in the area. It’s a fascinating
movie because the heroes — whose devil-may-care exploits and in particular
their penchant for doing rope-climbs up buildings to chase after crooks earn them
the nicknames “Batman” and “Robin” from the locals — seem to be up against it
from everybody: not only the
crooks but also their fellow cops, the ones who want to see the department run
“by the book” as well as the ones who are on the “take” and the ones who aren’t
on the take themselves but believe Greenberg and Hantz themselves are. It’s a
movie that in some ways could only
have been made in the early 1970’s, partly because it was a high-crime era and
police officers like Harry Callahan and Popeye Doyle (of Dirty Harry and The French Connection, respectively — the latter also based on a true
story) were movie heroes precisely because they went after criminals whole-hog
and ignored anything that stood in their way, from the police bureaucracy to
the Constitution. The film begins and ends with ceremonies in which Greenberg
and Hantz are promoted out of uniform-wearing patrolmen into plainclothes
detectives — in the opening ceremony Greenberg and Hantz play themselves and in
the later one Liebman and Selby have taken over. The Super Cops began life as a 1973 book about the real “super
cops” by L. H. Whittemore, and MGM won out over three other studios which were
also bidding on the same material.

They assigned Lorenzo Semple, Jr. to do the
script — ironically he had also written the pilot and the theatrical film
script for the ABC-TV Batman
series in 1966, the one that took such a campy approach to the material more
recent Batman mavens have
denounced it even though it was an enormous hit at the time and drew a lot of
new fans to the character (including Yours Truly). In some respects it’s a film
that could only have been made at its time — the haircuts of the men in the New
York Police Academy’s Class of 1974 would be enough to give it away — though in
others one could imagine it being made in the 1930’s, or for that matter today.
The basic concept of rambunctious individualists joining highly hierarchical
organizations like the military and police or fire services and screwing things
up was the stuff of which a thousand movies were made — indeed, if The
Super Cops had been filmed in 1934 instead
of 1974, it would probably have been a Warner Bros. vehicle for James Cagney
and Pat O’Brien and the payoff would have been that they would ultimately learn
to follow the institutional rules implicitly and become better officers for it.
Instead, after a series of picaresque adventures in which they scale buildings
and, at one point. start looking for a squad of (white) hired killers who’ve
been brought in from Detroit to target them, they’re trapped in a building,
along with the crook they’ve been tailing and have provoked into a shootout,
just when a large crane with a wrecking ball attached comes along and starts
demolishing the building. They signal to the driver and literally ride the wrecking ball out of the building and use
it to get back to the street. The other oddity about The Super Cops is the director, Gordon Parks, who became the first
African-American ever hired as a photographer for Life magazine and, in that capacity, shot the iconic
photograph of Malcolm X speaking that he later used in his film Shaft to decorate the walls of “The Lummumbas,” a group of
thug-like but socially respectable and even appealing young men anxious to do
what they could to cut down the level of Black-on-Black violence in their
communities. Parks’ previous films, The Learning Tree and Shaft,
hardly prepared one for a film in which, while Black people figure prominently
in the dramatis personae, the two
leads are white. One imdb.com reviewer said it wasn’t as exciting as Parks’s Shaft — and apparently Parks thought so himself — but I
liked this one considerably better than Shaft, I suspect at least partly because Parks had in the
meantime “found” himself as a suspense and action director.

The Super Cops is full of big, exciting, rambunctious action scenes
that not only entertain in themselves but also project the characters:
everything we see Greenberg and Hantz do fits into who and what we’ve been told
they are. The film is also quite remarkable in depicting the edgy relationship
between the police (it’s an indication of the time period that we don’t see any women or Blacks in Greenberg’s and Hantz’s class at
the Academy, though one Black police official later appears and plays an
important role in the film’s denouement) and the communities they’re supposed to be “protecting and serving.”
The mutual level of mistrust is shown in a scene in which the cops have busted
the Hayeses, or at least some of their lower-level minions, and a group of
Black locals forms at the door of the building and say they’re not going to let
the cops take the “brothers” into custody. It’s also shown in the movie’s most
fascinatingly multidimensional character, Sara (Sheila E. Frazier), who’s
introduced standing in a doorway, wearing a revealing red dress, looking
delectable and every inch the prostitute, whom the cops accost not for sexual services but information about the local
gang and drug scenes — and she becomes a reluctant informer but her disgust
both with the situation in the ghetto and with the cops themselves, and with
the impossible bind it puts her in (inform and risk the opprobrium of her own
people, or don’t inform and
thereby do nothing while the ghetto sinks ever deeper into the trap of mass
drug abuse), makes her a wonderful character and easily the most deeply and
richly drawn person in the movie. The Super Cops is a marvelously picaresque movie, benefiting over Dirty
Harry and The French Connection in actually having a sense of humor, and it owes its
recent rediscovery to a writer-director named Edgar Wright, who quoted a line
from it in his own film Hot Fuzz
and lobbied Warner Home Video to issue it on DVD as part of thier Warner
Archive Collection, as well as appearing as last night’s “guest programmer” on
TCM and showing it as part of an oddly assorted bunch of four films: the 1934
Busby Berkeley musical Dames, the
1970’s Hollywood-themed murder mystery The Last of Sheila, and Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 O Lucky Man!, his second film with Malcolm MacDowell.